Of Shadows in Darkness that I Wished to Own
by theleonhearted
Summary: It is not victory or loss which defines them, but a battle waged word and tooth in the darkness of the mind. {Loki/Sif}
1. Clockwork Dark

**Author's Note: **This work invokes some relatively pertinent trigger warnings, the most striking of which being its slight parallels to a rape narrative. While no rape occurs here, there is some argument that the emotional turmoil faced by the characters in this story may lend itself to somewhat dubious consent. The story is rated 'M' for non-graphic sexual content and for the abovementioned reasons, as well as general adult themes.

This work also involves some shifting between "past" time and "present" time, as it takes place both before the events of Thor and after the events of The Avengers depending upon the section. Sections taking place in the past are written in past tense; those taking place in the present are written in present tense.

**UPDATE:** as of 6 April 2013, I am dividing this work into chapters for easier reading.

**Disclaimer: **I own nothing. Nothing at all. Not even my own sanity.

* * *

Shadows are frightfully common phenomena in Asgard.

It is a logical thing, in truth. Within a kingdom rich with gleaming metal furnishings and singing with light, the presence of shadows is only natural. Expected.

To the prisoner Loki, the shadows are invaluable tools: tools by which to gauge the passage of time, each shift a second to be hoarded like precious gold and smelted into usable information. They are something which he, muzzled and bound and stripped down to the barest rags, can claim as his own. Instruments of a plotting mind.

Yet numbers, and the focus of mind required for their use, are a luxury for the free and well-fed: inconsequential in the face of an empty stomach and a roaring head.

The captive sits with spine arched against the limpid crystal wall that encloses his circular holding cell, hands clamped in metal bracers and held stiff before his body. He rattles the short length of chain connecting them, if only for the noise, and releases a long breath. Loki's punishment was decided even before his brother led him home.

He eyes the chamber containing the enclosure, small and laden with dust. Its walls are rimmed with scarlet-flamed torches situated in stone brackets near to the ceiling. Loki watches them flicker with a kind of hushed malice, birthing an army of shadows which ghost across lifeless surfaces. They flock to him readily, like so many sheep.

A friend to the shadows are the whispers, low tones uttered by well-armed guards who stand just outside the metal doors of the room; and Loki thinks they, too, might be of use to him, if not for the maddening idleness of their owners.

During the short periods he designates as 'night', the voices cease. Sound itself diffuses into the dark, leaving only the throb of a pulse in the prisoner's neck.

He measures three such cycles of thrumming chatter followed by stark-noiselessness, three days which dissolve seamlessly into three nights, before a disturbance breaches the pattern. A tiny, abrupt screech of grinding chrome, succeeded quickly by the unmistakable creak of an opening door, the soft patter of footsteps.

His loyal shadows storm the intruding figure with such vehemence that he cannot distinguish its features. It eases the doors shut, treads lightly to the enclosure and frees the lock with a mild _click_; then steps up, up, into the torchfire.

Loki freezes when he sees her. The great warrior Sif, towering before him, her face livid in the aura of flame. For a fleeting second he thinks to move, to spring up; it's futile. With a brutal flourish, she rips him from the wall by the hands and throws him into the floor.

Sif approaches the prisoner again, curled on his side against cold ground. The plates of armor which are her trademark have been abandoned for simpler garments appropriate for sleep, sparsely threaded; and in that moment Loki finds the will to smirk, behind the metal, behind the pain. They are leveled at least in one way, here within this cell.

Yet still his hands remain clasped, while hers freely roam: a finger traced down the fabric clothing his side, another worrying the base of his spine. She trails her nails into the cloth, twists, and Loki's pulse races in his throat, beheath her claws. She meets his eyes.

Loki's countenance is clear, slated clean of emotion, even as she rakes lines across his chest. Even now, Sif cannot discern whether the behavior is a trick.

He cannot fight, cannot escape the reality of his bindings; but Loki could never submit to Sif, to any challenger, even in so cruel an arena. He does not struggle or thrash, but instead adopts a hollow look, a more subtle weapon.

A stray shadow stalks her face and captures it. Anger blooms rouge across her cheeks, and then she's scraping a dagger pulled from nowhere across his sleeve, snapping thread and grazing skin in one flawlessly executed streak. A warning.

Sif shoves him back against the wall, into a seated position; mounts him, sweeping his arms over his head in a fluid motion. He growls into metal, nose bent to cold air, as she slams her hips into his own.

Loki's arousal presses into her thigh, and he curses. Her breaths are already short.

_She is shadow._

Sif's hair is a wraith, a curtain of darkness, brushing the planes of his chest as forceful hands scale the fabric of his tunic upward, revealing pale skin dappled with bruises. Wafts of torchborn shadow splinter the flesh, swarm her fingers as they glide across the surface. She captures his gaze, holds it, determined to at least maintain the charade of control.

Her discipline is slackening now. She doesn't bother with his boots, and injures a fastener when she tangles one hand into the band of his trousers, lurid and lost. She strives against him, her leggings having been discarded some time ago, unaccounted for by either party. It is cruel and it is licentious and it is desperate, and Loki is painfully hard but can do nothing except watch the blur of her fingers as they chafe, critically working at a furious pace.

She seems to swallow the unheard sounds he makes, choked by metal. He can see the sweat that pools at her temples because her head is thrown to the ceiling, cast in dim torchlit flame that bewitches her hair alive. Furious thrusts. Sif's throat flutters with perverse shadows at play, shudders with the force of her breath, and it requires every reserve of control he can command to keep from ramming his bounded hands into the ground.

When she releases she does so breathlessly, unhinged, and Loki can taste the lust lying thick upon her tongue like honey. She collapses against him as though felled, a vital error which remains unamended for several seconds.

Then she bolts off of him, her body like lightning, scraping her cloth pants from their listless position some distance from his head. Her eyes bore into his the color of charcoal. He does not think for their ferociousness.

Sif leaves without a word, his traitorous erection pulsing against his stomach in the exact rhythm of her footsteps.

* * *

The first time Loki approached her, she was lying upon the earth.

He had seen her encroach upon the training grounds a number of times previously, a thin, towheaded little girl in boyish clothing. She roosted in a different spot each day, daring closer and closer to the main facilities, bright eyes wide with the desire to learn.

On this particular day the child Thor, in a rather uncharacteristic display of awareness, had noticed the girl creep too close to an overzealous boy brandishing a sword. The boy swung quick and true, as had been instructed of him, and knocked the poor girl back with the force of his elbow.

Loki, who had been idling his time near the outskirts of the projectiles quadrant, managed to peer up from the book in his hands long enough to witness the boy in a panicked frenzy, rushing over to the scene with his face bunched up like a drying grape. A most humorous sight.

"Brother!" Thor called, swinging his arms with something Loki might distinguish as concern. "Come here! There is a young girl in need of aid!"

The child lay splayed out, limbs akimbo, before the fiercely apologetic young boy who had knocked her down; she struggled to sit upright, raising a hand to rub at her now-swollen nose.

"Are you well, fair girl?" Thor asked her with some pause. She nodded, looking cross.

"It is rare to come upon a lady on these warrior's grounds," the young prince thundered, extending a hand to help her along. When she refused, springing herself up, he laughed at the feat. "What calls you here, Lady...?"

"Sif," she proclaimed, and extended her chest in a manner so pitiably laughable that Loki struggled to conceal his sneer behind the withered pages of his book. "And I was observing the fighting, of course."

"How marvelous!" he laughed, his hair shaking with the force of it. "I am Thor, and this is my brother Loki."

She shifted her gaze between the two of them. The whole of the kingdom knew the faces of its princes, the hearty blade-brandishing son of Odin and his dark foil who even in that moment stood with a disinterested flair, thumbing the spine of his tome before sinking his nose into its crease once more.

"Ah, brother!" Thor cast his golden head to the sky in laughter, bracing a hand on his knee. "Your face kisses that book like a hog its slops!"

The girl frowned. "I have seen him often, there in the shadows with a book in his hand while yourself and the other boys practice form," she told Thor snidely, who inclined his head and smiled in acquiescence. When Loki gave no reaction, she narrowed her eyes.

"Spar with me, book-prince!" she exclaimed, by all counts a child, one hand gesturing to Loki's forearm and the other sported on her hip.

"I'll refrain, Lady Sif," he said curtly, and looked with annoyance to his brother. Thor's grin spread larger than his face.

She appeared insulted, crossed her arms over her chest. "I will become a warrior," she informed the darker prince stiffly, "and protect this land."

Thor stamped his approval happily into the rock, his grin-bared teeth outshining even the steel of his sword; he grasped the girl's hand in excitement, commending her 'most honorable' and jabbering on about how no enemy would expect a female to come at them with knives and that the prospect was brilliant.

"You fancy yourself a fighter?" Loki asked suddenly, surfacing from the text to administer a critical glare. "Your future lies within the meaning of your name*."

The anger blossomed on her cheek quick and powerful, splotching her pale face. Thor looked alarmed at the feral brace of her teeth.

"Pay him no heed, my lady!" the golden boy laughed nervously, shooting his brother an exasperated glance. "He is only sore because training occupies his reading time!"

"Moreso your constant prodding than the training," Loki muttered, but provoked the matter no more.

The time that elapsed from those words to the moment when the projectiles trainer collected the young princes was short but distinguished, consumed with the rowdy prattlings of a young girl and the boy warrior who so captivated her wishful spirit that she never noticed his brother slip away.

* * *

_* 'Sif' _is an Old Norse word meaning 'Wife' or 'Bride'.


	2. Where the Little Ones Went

Sif's footsteps are curt and prominent as she marches toward the prison room, designed to be heard and acknowledged without mistake. The guards nod to her as she clasps the handle, not daring to offend her by opening the doors themselves; the woman's disdain toward chivalry is famous within the palace halls.

She approaches the prisoner in a line perpendicular to that of her mouth. A platter of food presses its weight against her hand, a prisoner's feast of bread, meat and water. This time, Sif's armor has returned in its full majesty: polished steel plates and metal frets, tough leather-hide pants, gauntlets which crease deep with the stiffness of her fingers.

Her eyes betray no account of the previous night's events.

"It has been decided that I shall be the one to deliver your meals," she announces, her body stonelike. Loki recalls a Midgardian word: 'professional'. It changes nothing.

They are both silent as she releases him, not without difficulty, from the restraints that bind his hands and each know of the guards who wait braced beyond the doors of the chamber, weapons threatening behind fingers itching for a chance to prove their valor. Sif makes no mentioning of them; she knows better than to tread on such unstable ice.

Loki eats his portion of bread and mutton without tasting, but savors the water—his first sample of the life-fluid since installed in his cell—with dripping slowness, letting it coat his arid tongue with precious moisture, tipping it back to cool his inflamed throat. Sif watches him throughout, noiseless, her feet arched into a careful point.

When he has finished she snatches the muzzle and cuffs and reattaches them crudely; lifts the emptied ware from the floor, and delivers him a glance of absolute enmity.

She leaves as stridently as she came.

* * *

The training grounds of the castle were extensive and scattered: great stretches of land splayed out into outcroppings of rock and equipped with barracks and weaponhouses. Here warriors were crafted, skills were honed, honor was claimed. To Loki, the warrior's barracks were breeding grounds of prideful and loquacious men. He detested the shameful schools, which groomed the brutest bullies into protectors of the kingdom while the weak straggled behind, despite any talents they might have displayed if only given the chance.

They were places that fostered the kind of animal thirst for battle displayed so often by his brother, an attitude whose inherent threat to the well-being of Asgard was handwaved as acceptable—glorified even—by the people, while boys of Loki's scholarship and sense received neglectful treatment.

Despite these truths—or perhaps, he thought grimly, because of them—Loki found himself in the smallest of the alcoves, which constituted the projectiles quadrant, almost nightly. Sheltered beneath a generously-leafed tree, he engaged the more obfuscated corners his mind beneath the blanketing wisdom of the stars.

He was never missed; he was far too quiet to ever be missed. The air was ever calm beyond the palace doors, so long as his brother had gone to bed in a content humor.

He craved the stillness, the solitude, the slipping away of time. Here he could meld with the shadows of the trees, so much grander than the shadow cast behind his brother. Since he had first held the notion he had escaped his rooms to join the night, never to be discovered by prodding eyes.

When the leaves above him began to rattle, Loki thought nothing of it. He rested his nose against his cape, breathed a quiet hum of sound. Then a voice broke the still.

"What are you doing here?"

The scrawny yellow-haired girl burst from the trees, clad in dark breeches and tunic further masked by darkness. Clutched in her hand was a small throwing dagger, unmarked, an obvious make of the sort used to train young warriors.

"You stole that blade," Loki remarked, amused. It was the first thing he thought to say. The girl tightened her grip in response, as if to protect the steel along with her reputation.

"Borrowed it," she retorted, a scowl edging into the smooth lines of her face. Her hands splayed out from her sides, suddenly, like a falling bird. "I do not need to explain myself to _you_," she sneered.

He met her protective stance with laughter, high and sharp and unpracticed. Sif's diminutive glare fell pitifully flat on her thin, ghostly face. Loki was reminded of a mewling baby animal.

"And why are you here, on warrior's grounds in the dead of night, with a _borrowed _blade?" his eyes were playful, but not in the innocent manner of a child; rather, they gleamed as to invite the evil wraiths of night to dance.

"I will become a warrior," she said flatly, astutely, a perfect mirror of their first encounter. "The head trainer refuses to let me participate until I prove myself worthy. So I have been coming out here, in the night, to practice my form. I care not whether you choose to support me."

He found himself wishing again to laugh, to sneer at the prospect of such a lanky, undisciplined, _female_ child someday protecting the realm; it was an absurd idea, a farce, and yet no sound left his lips, no smile bent his mouth.

"Why are _you _out here?" she asked him suddenly, her eyes burnished with the unbounded, purposeful energy of a child determined.

The silence fermented awhile before he answered her. "Perhaps I enjoy the darkness," he said, turning his gaze upward as, just in that moment, a flicker of moonslight drifted beneath the leaves of his tree. A mocking gesture, he thought bitterly, even as the beams touched his cheek softly in recompense.

"You hold no purpose here, other than to stare at shadows? Does that not seem to you to be ..." Sif's voice faltered before continuing, "rather strange?"

"There are some who believe me wicked," he said simply, shifting his body as though entranced by some marvel of the earthen ground invisible to her, to every set of eyes but his.

She stepped closer to him, her hair pale gossamer, the moons' light a sheet of brilliance that danced upon the strands. "I don't think you to be wicked."

He watched as the lazy beams scattered across her hair. The silver drifting of light framing Sif's delicate face made him want to touch. He almost did, until her cry of surprise halted the path of his hand.

"What are you doing?!" she shouted, flustered, smoothing her hair down with an errant hand. He started up then, springing to his feet in a sudden rush of vertigo, green battering the edges of his vision. "Where are you going?"

"The shadows do not touch it," was all that he said, in a voice that did not reach her ears.


	3. Antithesis State

If the first night had been measured in shadows, so the second is measured in light: in the slivers of torchfire that cut across her cheek, the vivid glare of metal reflected in crystal, the emerald brilliance of his eyes.

Sif is ever-resourceful, a trait which did not fade in Loki's absence: her breeches leave her body quickly, offering tribute to the shadows with an aimless kick. She hasn't the patience to meddle with his trousers, and claws at the fabric in a haze; the cloth snaps in protest, threads splintering beheath her hands, and he strives against his own restraints.

"Onto your knees," Sif says quickly, a fine tremor seizing the voice which Loki knows so intimately, unabashed and hoarse and sharp as a blade. He scrambles and she grunts, pulling him up gracelessly into the desired position. He kneels before her because power is a thing hoisted and squandered by gods, and the subjugation of lesser beings is something which Loki well understands.

She reaches and bunches his tunic in her fingers, as though repressing the urge to rend it with her hands; then yanks it upward past his sternum, dives down to strike with her teeth.

She worries a particularly gruesome-looking bruise with the dagger tip of her tongue, just below his heart, before pushing hard into the blued flesh. Spots of pain prick his eyelids, brush the length of his arms like a blanket of thorns.

_She is war._

"What is it, shadow-prince?" she bites flush into his neck, sucks claim into the flesh, and her nails are a merciless vice. "What ails you? Surely you will not submit so easily—or is it only the harmless Midgardian mortals who incite your hand?" Sif draws her palm along the length of her thigh, commanding his gaze as she brushes calloused fingertips over her folds.

He nearly speaks then in spite of the muzzle, but the words tangle like snakes within his throat: sunken, vacant, coated in the slick of saliva, pitched and fallen flat along with his screams.

"_Coward_," she whispers, because she knows that she is—that they both are—and arches her body taut against her fingers.

Loki knows these sounds, he knows intimately the movements of her body as it reacts when he's magicking her with his own fingers, because it's ground captured and chartered and studied more thoroughly than the mischief god would ever venture to admit.

For her to reach climax takes no time at all, and Loki revels in the small victory of a weakness brought to light, just as her skin glows ruddy beneath the latitude of countless forks of snickering flame.

The stone irritates his spine, grating the nerves, and Sif's expression is indecipherable as its ingrained grooves. She leers over him, toward his own impatiently-bared erection, which arches fruitlessly against cloth. And she glares, because the wicked smile she's trying to execute fails with the effete muscles at the corners of her lips. A small loss, but one Sif cannot afford.

So she leaps up. Snatches her discarded clothing from the floor in a blaze of torchfire. Dresses.

And leaves.

* * *

She barely remembers bringing the captive his food the following day.

She barely remembers anything at all of the day, save for a few stubborn tidbits. The wolfish grin of Volstagg as he swirls his morning mead; the great gray bird sweeping the sky over her head as she spars with another warrior; the consoling hand of Thor, which had confirmed their mutual sadness over the issue which currently rests hunched against the clear walls of a dimly-lit enclosure.

They hadn't spoken when Loki was brought to the palace and they've not spoken since—not of the prodigal prince, not of his plight, not of past or of future. Their conversations instead take place in the language of dampened glances and kind gestures, and in heated matches carried out at the break of dawn, where they exhaust the frustration through furious blows which render their blades dull.

Sif's body throbs with a fatigue that only worsens as the sky shifts into its evening hues, into a nightfall marked with a smattering of stars—some which twinkle with splendid brilliance and others remaining motionless, envious of the beauty of their peers.

Her head swims with light, piercing light, green light which comes in spikes someplace behind her retinas; she stumbles over a wayward crag while making her way back to her rooms from the warrior's grounds, catches herself deftly, silently grateful for the lack of witnesses.

She doesn't think of him because he is already inside her mind, and the ability to think is a luxury compared to the presence of this shadow—of a criminal, a king, a god. Instead she traces a nail down the cold, smooth surface of one of her knives, and does not ponder its likeness to his skin, even now, even now.


	4. Gold Snare

He found that to uncover the whereabouts of her quarters was a laughably simple task.

The girl resided with her mother in a tucked-away location off the east wing, a place where Loki, for all his curiosity, had not yet ventured. Their living space was largely unadorned and designed for comfort rather than splendor: ragged furs lined the beds in the place of finer cuts, the metal walls unmarked and dull enough that their presence was almost unnoticeable in darkness.

The child—Sif—slept noiselessly beside her mother. She lay flat upon her back, her small hands balled into what Loki regarded as pitiful fists.

_She thinks herself fierce even in sleep, _he thought with a grimace, carefully sidestepping onto the shaggy mound of fur clumped on the stone floor.

A silver dagger glittered in his hand, freshly sharpened and alive with purpose.

Her hair, golden and beautiful, lay splayed out before his eyes. Flowing and arrow-straight, it seemed to writhe—like serpents, like tongues, a flurry of sun-colored flame.

She was unworthy of that hair.

Like so many other things hoarded in secrecy, those yellow locks were a prize to be won. A splendid token purloined from the battlefield, a golden goblet stolen from beneath the bloodred mouth of a king. And he would claim it for his own, as he would all those things and more.

The dagger whistled in the air. Glinted once, twice, thrice with resistance from the cells. Loki shivered, an urging of his pulse.

The lock of gold loosened, freed, into his hand. He watched as the strands glimmered between his fingers, even in the pure of darkness. He watched, and was seized with envy.

It was light which made her beautiful, the gold of her hair. Only to remove her light, and all would again be well. Loki's heart raced loud enough to ruin him, but he did not stop the motion of his hand as it brushed the child's scalp.

When the shadows had reached Sif's hair, he was already gone.

* * *

His dreams are entrenched in wafts of light, silky beams sent forth by the moons with a cruel kiss to shine on waves of lovely yellow hair. Golden strands give way to black that fall about a pale face like thunder, sleek and coarse, and he watches as a weft is crushed gently, alluringly, by glittering teeth.

He reaches to touch it, the hair so unlike his brother's, his father's, all of Asgard's; but it flutters beyond his reach, a haze of coal-dark flame. A treasure, lying just beyond his thieving fingers.

She's taunting him, pieces of hair brushing his ribs as her nails pierce his scalp; it is tortuous, an act designed to humiliate, to instigate his fury and leave him howling like a spoiled child denied his supper. The restraints are solid and infuriating, cutting into his wrists like frost, trapping the lips that seek so desperately to claim, to maim, to destroy.

It is enraging and tantalizing and it thrills him, _thrills_ him, and there would be no greater pleasure than to kill her and to ravish her and to ruin her beyond all repair, to take her as his greatest trophy, this woman who lingers like a phantom within his mind.

_She is honey._

When he awakens he is hard, achingly and wantonly hard, his breath coming in short, labored gasps behind the confines of the muzzle.

She does not come to him that night.

* * *

The next time he saw her, her hair was cropped short and dark.

The affair was hushed up, arbitrarily attributed to scientifical strangeness, the oddities of development of a growing child. Some elders claimed the girl was cursed by the gods, her blackened tresses a sign of punishment for forsaking tradition and training in the fields with the young men. If Sif knew anything of these whispers, she remained unaffected.

She'd found Loki again, camped in the exact spot as he had been during their initial nighttime encounter. Sif clambered up to him with a swagger too great for her child's frame, her fists pressed into her hips. Loki acknowledged her with an arched eyebrow, and almost at once regretted it.

"They've agreed to train me," she announced haughtily, and the matter was left at that.

In the days and years that followed her hair remained dark, but not cropped; as Sif grew in stature and height, so did the strands on her head.

Her egregious manner grew as well, and her thirst for purpose; but never did she cease her nightly journeys onto the grounds. Loki's ears grew sharp to her movements, even from generous distances: he learned, as easily as if studied from a book, to listen for the quick hiss of blades tearing through air, no longer thefted but Sif's in earnest; he learned the signature crunch of her boots as they stampeded through the mess of autumn leaves; he learned even to listen for the howl of the chill winds brushing through her hair, wild and loose and streaked with debris.

"Your eyes will fail to serve you should you continue that," her voice informed him curtly one night, and he almost smiled because he'd known for some time that she was there.

He had become accustomed to reading in the darkness, guided by moonslight: texts brimming with spells, ancient tomes scripted in ornate characters detailing the magics of old. He pored over them with a hunger which dwarfed that of his appetite, hoarded them in the security of his rooms. He learned their contents, and in secret he trained himself in the way of sorcerers.

"You did not come to lecture me." The book snapped shut, and Loki could taste her frown.

"Why do you continue to brush me aside?"

She had taken to sitting with him, watching him read after daily training, ignoring the protests of a rapidly broadening Thor to simply let him be. Loki never paid her mind, abandoning the girl's interest in favor of graying pages and practiced spells, until she sighed with exasperation and scurried off, irritated.

Loki lifted his face to look at her, this child-woman whose thighs had not been so muscular as memory from a few months ago would provide, whose hair streamed untamed across shoulders that had once appeared so bony and frail.

"You are a persistent and foolhardy girl," he said idly, and leaned into the steady-yielding curve of his ancient tree. "But not stupid. Your mind's energy rivals that of your body, and equals it." He stopped as she leaned backward, slumping before him into the earth so gracelessly that Loki could have thought it deliberate.

"You had thought me mindless, before?" she asked him, finding his gaze, and he sneered.

"Mindlessness would suit you," he replied, concealing a laugh that stung his cheeks. "It would characterize you far better, to possess a wasteful mind in the place of a mind wasted."

Sif watched as Loki worked a thread of magic into a thunder-felled branch at her feet, long and slender and blackened at the edges. The twig shook in place, a feeble resistance, before rising into the air and snapping harsly in two.

"You are the one responsible for all the tricks," she said then, because she could think of nothing other to say. His magic seemed a cruel force. "No one sees you do it, but I know."

Silence.

"You're the cause of your brother's trial," she continued, and Loki inhaled at that, a flare of resentment seizing his tongue. "His armor goes missing and then it reappears the following day. You find pleasure in teasing him."

One of the segments of branch snapped again.

"And you, Lady Sif?" Loki inquired sharply, curving into the wood. "You follow him like a dog, trail on his every word, execute his commands like a handmaid waiting upon her queen!"

"Your brother is a mighty warrior," she retorted, the annoyance prevalent now in the lines of her face, in the climbing timbre of her voice. "The field is his strength, as it is mine. He is a prized fighter and he places his faith in my abilities."

"My brother is a fool who would plunge this realm into chaos and war without remorse!" he shouted, and suddenly he was _right there_, a breath's reach from her face, advancing long, stilted fingers to her neck as she blinked with disbelief.

"How did you become so close?" she choked, truly choked, for the air seemed all too suddenly to shrivel up into the most minuscule pocket of her throat.

"This," he said, the icy nails retracting from her skin, "is _my_ strength."

She said nothing, merely allowed herself to be filled with the potion of revelation, the contrasts of magic and might, and understood. And she was afraid.

"Do you still not think me wicked?" he whispered, and her thoughts turned instantly to that first night's meeting, beneath the yellowing leaves of this very tree. "In confidence of these things you know as truths, this cleverness you possess, would you still seek me, with my books and my shadows, out as a companion in these cursed grounds?"

She jumped to her feet then, steady and swift, pacing back as he had known she would, as he knew all of them one day would. He pursed his lips as she turned, read her back as she walked away, expecting nothing less and everything worse.

Loki did not expect her to turn back, did not expect her to look at him with soft eyes. He dug his spine into the tree and tried to empty his mind. And he shook.

Some time later, when he'd returned to the emptiness of his chambers, he uncovered the woodbox which housed the treasure he had taken for himself so many nights ago in the stale air of a dark room swathed in shaggy furs.

The lock of hair had turned as black as his own.


	5. Waste You

Her bedchamber is as merciless as the memory of his smile.

Sif inhales with the distending of her stomach, reacting only as expected to the assault of fingers too short to be his; yet the mind is a wondrous theater, and she arches like a siren into the touch, _his _touch, her body arched taut like a bow.

_"I will reduce you to ash."_

His hands are at her breasts behind the curtains of her eyes, just as before; his eyes glow impish like jeweled specters, clouded jade and burnished at the edges with lust.

Her pace has increased now, fingers working rapid at her core—a hasty rhythm and a utilitarian one, designed to bring relief quickly. It is a tactic far contrary to the mischief god's own salacious methods, but Sif is aware, as she has always been, that such matters lie much further into his scope of expertise than her own.

When she reaches her limit she forces back an errant cry, and continues to strive against her hands through the violent tremors that wrack her body. She pulls her lip into her teeth because his voice is raw in her ear, and she digs abject into the skin, because it is the sole alternative to shrieking like a dying animal.

_"I will cause you to become undone."_

The figure reflected in the metal walls appears foreign, unworldly—acid-black hair splayed over a white chest, trembling hands and sweat beading at her hairline—the stark-stripped essence of woman and warrior and living being. She looks as broken as she feels, as broken as she loathes that he knows her to be, and winces at the thought of the pleasure he must garner from such disreputable knowledge.

Her bottom lip has split from the applied pressure of her teeth, and when she runs her tongue over the fissure, she finds the metallic tang reminiscent of his mouth.

When her lashes finally graze her cheeks, his eyes are the last thing she sees.

* * *

They met, as they so often did, in one of the narrower corridors which fed into the dining hall, a bemused prince and a seething girl-warrior contorting her fists in rage, obviously sore.

"You still harbor resentment over Fandral's lucky shot?" he chided, his laughter a knife thrust clean between the ribs.

"Never have I been grazed in a battle, mock or otherwise," Sif clipped sourly, her boots clicking true against the floor.

"What has become of you? You've grown even more reckless of late," Loki informed her, and no sooner had the words left his lips than a thunderous roar of laughter shook the floors from inside the great hall, no doubt the product of one of Volstagg's more riveting anecdotes.

None had noticed their chronic absences from mealtimes, or at least none had come to question them, perhaps choosing to attribute them to the rebellious nature of adolescence.

"False!" she huffed, and then, realizing her stance, drew her body up into a line, a heavy scowl breaching her mouth. "I am far more collected in my actions than the others." The statement needed no elaboration; they both knew which men—which warriors—constituted these 'others'. The so-called Warriors Three were establishing quite a name for themselves out on the grounds. "I am a mountain of calm."

"You are an avalanche," he amended. The bewilderment that swept her face proved nothing short of delightful to him, for reasons unexplored. "I see you on the grounds with those three, Sif, with my brother. You brandish your sword about like an oaf, swing without looking, like a child all too eager to prove. Your skill is above such behavior."

The anger raced in thin ribbons to her fingers, fingers which reached for the daggers held warm against her body, meticulously honed and deathly sharp, like spearheads, like resolve.

"I have risen a worthy warrior!" Sif shouted, eyes glazed as she took in the infuriating stillness of Loki's gaze. "By my own merit I have groomed myself into one of the finest fighters Asgard has come to know, by my own skill I have won favor in the eyes of the All-Father to train amongst conditions only the most capable of men have braved!"

Her fingers betrayed her fear. Trembling and stiffly-held, naked now in the absence of one of her knives. For a long moment, Loki watched her crumble.

He did not realize his own breathlessness until Sif's hand darted toward him, calloused and no longer white but tinted by sun, by long days spent on a training-field delivering blows to boys twice her size.

"And I have done it all," she breathed, "despite the inhibitions of my gender."

The corridor wall was metal and reflected her movements as she shoved Loki against it; and this time, when he did not breathe, it was intentional.

"My brother's influence," Loki said softly, finally, only vaguely aware of the metal cool breaching his clothing. He closed his eyes, and Sif could taste even then the pearls of quicksilver that beaded on his tongue, the most lovely of poisons. "It will ruin you."

When she kissed him, Loki didn't dare open his eyes. He didn't resist the awkward slant of her mouth, of lips pursed too tight. He didn't force Sif away, though his fingers twitched with a lacing of restlessness, rigid and cold against the wall. Not only restlessness, but he pretended.

When it was over she stumbled back, confused and wavering, before pulling him close to her. Only then did he open his eyes.

"You'll speak of this to no one," she whispered harshly, her fingers pulsing a deadly rhythm into his neck, "or I will kill you where you stand."

She did not look back to see his face.


	6. White Painted Ribs

She pulls his lips against her breast.

Loki's cheeks glow angry scarlet from the chafed marks grooved into his skin by the removed muzzle, his lips a burning ember on a dying fire. She can hear, just beyond the metal doors, the loud snoring of guards forsaking their duty for the pleasurable embrace of sleep.

Neither of them concedes the fact that Sif has grown more daring, more reckless, even as his freed lips brand shapes into her skin as proof in the stead of his still-bound hands. He permits himself no words, for to speak would be to acknowledge the reality of the situation—the gravity of it—and Loki can see no reason to spoil such a favorable sequence of events even in the lingering shadow of his counsel.

She pulls him up again, pushes him back clumsily, and he breathes a hollow, splintered laugh at the spectacular lack of finesse. She closes her teeth around his bottom lip in response, _hard, _and he emits a strangled cry of pain before re-centering his focus.

"Be still," Sif orders, because she must. And presses her authority into Loki's throat.

She moves against him, his arms shackled above the tangled swath of hair, and draws on his every breath, his every whimper; and when with a hand she ghosts the tips of her fingers across the erection straining his cloth trousers, he moans deep and without pause from the center of his throat.

It is a difficult feat, to remain silent. Loki releases his curses into her mind, an old and familiar trick, and she grants him mercy by swallowing the seeds of sound from his tongue. Sif can think of a dozen ways to silence Loki, a dozen more to break him down. But victory is never assured, and she relishes in the fractured cry he gives when she frees his cock and palms it.

Then she stops suddenly and grins, the grin of a victor eyeing his spoils; and it's such a wonderfully, wonderfully wicked grin that Loki succumbs before it with a feral snarl, his hips arching aimlessly into unwelcoming air, impossibly hard.

She does nothing to relieve him.

She does nothing to relieve herself, either. She stands in silence, walks over to retrieve the discarded muzzle and, with minimal resistance, fastens it securely over the mischief god's mouth.

_She is victory._

She has won her battle, retrieved her prize. She has brought him to ruin, to utter surrender. It is the most satisfying vengeance, and a reminder of place, a testament to Sif's power over him. It is a principle he knows as intimately as his own hand.

After she is gone, he throws his body into the wall and does not scream.

* * *

The peculiarities of adolescence branched further into young adulthood, but not without impediments.

They found themselves dutifully expected at harvest feasts, and pleasure feasts, and feasts for every occasion which the kingdom could claim as excuse to engage in the vast consumption of food and ale.

Sif, of course, not being royalty, could far more easily slip unnoticed from the crowds of increasingly reddening Asgardians, a privilege most welcome to the more impatient side of the girl warrior. Loki was not so lucky, but—as with all things, she'd come to notice—he had a trick up his sleeve.

The first time he'd deployed a copy of himself to sit a feast in his stead, she was unaware of by just what methods Loki had managed to sneak out to their spot on the grounds. When he demonstrated his magic, she'd leapt up in astonishment, snatching a blade from her confines and whipping it at the impostor.

Both copies had thrown their heads back and laughed.

"You'll be found out, before long," she informed him later, when the stillness of night had set in once more. Her voice still bore a trace of resentment at having been effectively fooled. "Even the cleverest of tricks leave shadows."

Loki, returned to his own single form, shook his head. "My whole self is but a shadow," he told her, and greeted her puzzled frown with a dour laugh.

"Your intelligence tries upon your sanity at times, I think," she told him after some pause.

"Oh? And does this conclusion arise from nothing?" he smiled darkly, a stark contrast to the light of his eyes. "Or have you come to realize that we are not so different, you and I, when my dearest brother is away?"

His words were a rope, a glittering cord that drew her in like bait on a line.

"See how we resemble one another," Loki crooned, snatching a piece of her hair between the fleshpads of his fingers and stroking before she swatted his hand away.

"We could not be more different," Sif said, drawing herself up, but she had taken to rubbing the disturbed strand with a vengeance that he noted a bit too adamant. "The thrills of battle appeal to my spirit, rather than the dullness of the hunt which requires cunning and care."

"Then why do you continue _this_ chase?" he asked in a tone like music, and she found she had no answer to give.

* * *

The guards clear a way for her with unquestioning respect as she approaches Loki's enclosure room with platter in hand. Shaking her head, she gestures with her free hand.

"There is a matter for which I am urgently needed," Sif tells the guard to her right, a squat, bristly-bearded man with shrewd features. "Please deliver this to the prisoner. Accept my apologies for the sudden request."

Her features are carved in stone. She tries to forge a more inviting countenance. She cannot.

The guard glances toward his companion and nods, accepting the food in a thick, gloved hand. "Yes, Lady Sif."

"My thanks."

She walks away from the imprisonment chamber, returning not to the grounds as she had intended but to her own rooms, the image of his face clawing into the backs of her eyelids like mice.


	7. Like Being Loved

Loki watched one clear morning as Sif traded blows with his brother, as was their custom. He solicited the cover of a rather knobby tree near their chosen spot, molding the line of his body into its shadow: a figment of the sun.

She transformed, in Thor's presence, into a child: into the same boisterous, heedless girl whom he had once seen scrambling upon her back, who approached the warrior's barracks dawn after dawn with a determination to learn both foolish and fierce—and in the end, ferocity had emerged the victor.

Loki looked on as their swords struck in furious time, their feet brisk upon the earth, a dance cast in light: light which streamed from the great heavenly star, which scattered into the strands of Thor's hair like golden rain.

They clashed together, blade and boot and clamorous cry: a picture of undeniable strength, of brute majesty definitive of gods.

At one moment an animal happened by, small and marked by thatches of coarse black fur; it froze before the two warriors, twitching its nose in fear, before jumping a good distance off the ground and scurrying away when Thor employed a particularly deep-cut swing with a grunt that shook the skies.

When they had tired, he shot her a toothy smile. "Your skills have much improved, Sif," he told her approvingly, having abandoned the 'lady' long ago at her duress. "How did you come to anticipate my movements?"

She simply grinned, and shook her head. "I've been benefiting from the aid of a most insightful teacher."

"Well, his knowledge of battle-art must be a thing to behold," Thor replied jovially, clapping her on the back. "Shall we make way back? I have heard whispers of a fine new ale to be served later this evening..."

Sif's hair was a specter in lightswept wind as she returned with Thor to the palace in calamitous tandem, his hand never leaving her shoulder.

* * *

Loki ruins her hair with his hands, finally freed, pulling hard enough to cause considerable pain and earning not a single protesting scream for his efforts.

Her tunic lies crumpled somewhere beneath them, a battle-flag tucked and at the ready; it is colored white, a morsel of irony that does not escape Loki even now, as his own shirt leaves his body at the mercy of her fingers.

"Will you say nothing, even now?" she asks him on a vicious breath, but her hands do not stop their roaming, and he responds by sinking his teeth into the flesh of her shoulder.

He makes the mistake of reaching for his trousers somewhere in the midst of her hands and his tongue and teeth; and instantly he knows he has done wrong, for she is twisting his wrists in a fashion that he is only too aware could split the bone if given adequate pressure.

"No," she snaps, and pulls hard on his hair.

He returns his ministrations to her body, to her breasts, to the area of expertise to which he is more than accustomed; and she sighs in what he knows to be an unwillful gesture as long fingers slide into the chinks between her ribs, the planes of her stomach, down to the familiar space between her legs.

Sif catches his throat, holds it between her fingers and does not move. She wants to kiss Loki. She wants to punish him with marks that do not fade with the gift of his magic, to shove him flush against the floor, to make a permanent place for herself between Loki's thighs. She wants to force herself onto his length, so quickly and so deeply that it hurts them both, that it hurts even into the breaking of dawn.

Sif wants these things even as she curses under the spell of Loki's mouth, and suddenly the pain is not enough. She grasps his wrist, guides it roughly to her abdomen.

He sinks two fingers into her, curls them upward, and her wetness gives her away so completely that his breath catches with the pleasure of it.

His lips are unyielding against her breasts, his teeth grazing a nipple because the motion is familiar, is intoxicating, and the moan that escapes her lips is fuel to his memories.

He does not love her and he does not seek her and he wants her for his own, yearns for nothing more than to witness that body prostrate in fear, in deference, in submission to him.

_She is poison._

He wishes to kill her.

He kisses her instead, kisses her because he cannot own her, cannot charm her, cannot even cast the image of her body from his mind.

She growls into his mouth, because his kiss is languid and it is slothful and it is filthy for its chastity, and the victory is nectar to Loki's lips.

She gains back all of the lost ground and more when she forces down his trousers and takes him in hand, palming the length with an insufferably tenuous pace.

If not for the wisdom of their own shadows indicating the elapsing of the seconds, he would not have been rightly able to gauge Time performing its duty; so encapsulating is Sif in her work, the meticulous appreciation for thoroughness so crucial to the constitution of a good warrior—a truth which his brother had never understood.

He's hissing now, pressing frost-dagger fingertips into the frets of her spine, because the unstoppable warrior has won again. The cadence of her fist forms a crude rhythm, the same odious battle-song heralded to the tune of innumerable war-felled bodies and fields soiled with life-blood. A song of conquest, of spoil and sin.

_"Sif."_

She allows him to come, this time and this night, because _you've a devious side, haven't you, _yet even strategy cannot fully belie the sovereignty of a living heart; and when he does he permits himself no cry, but his body trembles with the force of release—with the gravity of total defeat at the work of her hands.

His blood courses icy-warm in the meter of her pulse, torchlight tracing over the hollows of his cheeks scarlet tongues which seem only to dance with a warrior's will.

Through it all, she stares steadfast into his eyes.


	8. Our Lady Queen

Sif had abandoned long ago any previous attempts to track the celebratory feasts in which the kingdom engaged; they were simply too numerous and all equally exuberant, humming with cheer and festive words—the natural effects of many bellies filled with meat and mead.

She attended this one—as she did them all—with chartered nonchalance: seated herself beside Fandral and Volstagg, met the latter's colorful tales with copious laughter. She joined in a bout of playful shoving instigated by a particularly bawdy anecdote, all the while chuckling with the good humor brought upon by ceaseless goblets of drink.

She was approached by a profanely cheerful Thor, who congratulated her latest battlefield accomplishment with a thunderous clap on the back and a promise to spar at a later time; and she watched with amusement as the golden prince bowed humorously low to the ladies littered throughout the hall upon his return to his seat.

Loki, she noticed, was tucked away on the far left end of the great room, engaging a pair of elderly women in what appeared to be a light conversation; his plate, though filled with various samples of rich harvest fare, lay untouched.

Nearly immediately he caught her gaze. His eyes were very, very green, as if mired in emerald flame.

Volstagg was sufficiently intoxicated so as not to pay heed to her abrupt standing a while later, before the fruit and honey had been served, but Fandral and Hogun required a more thorough explanation to the prospect of her leave. She grasped their shoulders affectionately, claiming a particular itch to be rid of her silk dress, and ensured them of an evening meeting on the grounds to practice form. Fandral shrugged the matter off as he did most inconveniences, shifting his attentions to the bright-eyed young lady seated two places to his right. Hogun merely nodded, in his glum manner.

The last thing Sif saw of the room before exiting was Loki's empty seat.

She found him in a dimly-lit corridor adjacent to the one which led into the dining hall, leaning smoothly against its polished wall with the air of one who has been graciously waiting for a dawdling child.

"The Lady Sif," he said silkily, acknowledging her with a modest bow. "How charming that I should greet you here."

"You were absent from the feast," she told him, choosing to circumvent any idle conversation.

"I should think you will find I was not," he said lightly, but the smile edging his lips was evidence enough. "Several could attest my presence in the hall tonight, including yourself—or am I mistaken?"

"Just because the others are blind to your apparitions, does not mean the same for my case." And she smiled.

"It would seem my abilities are fading," he said, extending a hand to cup her jaw, "or perhaps you are simply growing too perceptive for your own well-being."

"Perhaps _you_ simply grow too predictable in your actions," she replied, her gaze flickering from his eyes to his lewdly-curved mouth and back again.

"Vast quantities of meat disinterest me," he told her casually, luring her into his hands, closer to his body and his voice. "The voracious appetite of the common beast suits me ill, I think. It is far better an attribute for one such as my brother, wouldn't you agree?" He glided forward from the wall then, walked behind her so as to reverse their positions.

She sneered and turned to face him, and by some feat of trickery he had again drawn himself close to her, a shadow to her shape. "I think the reason you are so slight may have more to do with your magicked copies replacing you during these feasts than with your disdain for the field."

He ghosted his tongue over the shell of her ear in response, swallowing her shivers with his breath. "Does my body repulse you, Lady Sif?" he asked quietly, his tone sickly saccharine, and then rolled his hips into her own without so much as a warning.

Her back hit the wall with the force of it; and she allowed herself to be seduced, because beneath the folds of her dress his hands were cool and serpentine along the surface of her thigh and his longcoat was a _remarkable_ annoyance, a barrier Sif longed to witness shred at the work of her hands.

"Remove that coat," she commanded him, not without difficulty—his tongue had discovered the hollow at the base of her neck—"and we shall see."

It fell away in increments, keeping acquaintance with the shadows drifting lazily under watch of the corridor's snickering torches. She held his body to hers, clutching his shoulders with agile hands.

Sif's dress was a further troublesome barrier, hitched up somewhere around her hips and remaining there by virtue of, she later surmised, some work of witchcraft. He kneaded the flesh beneath with his knuckles, edged along the faint jut of bone, her back flush against metal as sleek and cool as his touch.

"Before long will arrive the day of Thor's birth," she said conversationally, in the voice of a woman whose neck and chest were not currently under siege of a tongue woven from satin. "On that day there will be a feast." She said it for no other reason than to incite him, and this he knew.

"For the glory of my brother," Loki replied smoothly, tracing crowns into her scalp.

"For the glory of Asgard," she amended, but her tone was delightfully playful, and it caused the hairs on Loki's neck to stand, because perhaps he had reached her after all. "For the glory of warriors."

"All of this can yet be broken," he mouthed to her lower lip, before claiming it roughly between his teeth.

* * *

Sif hands the prisoner his food without speaking, and he accepts with a snowy countenance, utterly still as she removes his restraints.

When she turns toward the guards, she can sense the poison of a forming smile.

"You are as wanton a partner as you were in adolescence, and as undisciplined," he says slowly. "The sole difference is that now, you cannot claim youth as an excuse."

It is his final trick.

She turns sharply to face him, and to Loki, the fury that seethes behind her teeth is an ambrosia to rival the drink of the gods.

"Watch him," Sif snarls at the nearest bewildered sentry, and his quick nod is the last thing she sees before she leaves the room.

* * *

The Lady Sif was viewed, in the eyes of the kingdom, as a glorious fighter, an impulsive spirit, and a perfect companion to Asgard's warrior prince.

Thor was the crown gem of their realm, had always been so, and everyone knew it. It was inevitable, a logical result of the man's unparalleled skill and golden grin. Sif understood well his charms, loved them herself, would in an instant plunge herself into the heart of death so he might be protected, her fellow warrior and dear, dear friend.

She'd kept her eyes trained modestly to the floors when the people of Asgard had begun to speak of her abilities, maintained them there when they proclaimed her beauty; gossip was never a thing of interest to her, nor the giggling young maids who most typically engaged in it. The best course of action, Sif decided, was to ignore the whispers that spread like a plague, distance herself from them, and much of the time this was sufficient.

The first she ever heard of the kingdom's latent expectations for her was, curiously enough, from the rose-colored lips of a little girl: fair and blue-eyed and bearing a jade ribbon in her beautiful yellow hair.

"Good day, Princess Sif," the child said softly, her voice near ethereal; at her back, the girl's mother opened her mouth to interject, but found a loss of words.

"I'm not a princess, child," Sif told her as courteously as she knew how, even as her heel scraped into the ground with discomfort. The little girl appeared surprised, tipping her head back to catch her mother's glance.

"Will you not one day wed Prince Thor and protect Asgard?" she asked, puzzled, as though this was the most obvious conclusion ever proposed in all the nine realms; and Sif picked fretfully at a scale of her armor. "Aren't you to be our queen, some day?"

It was the mother's apologetic countenance that Sif met when she answered, slowly, respectfully: "I have not known reason to ponder such a thing."

The kingdom thought her humble.


	9. Wine Dark Sea

She could taste the wine that had soaked into his tongue, leaving it as sanguine as his lips—lips which moved to latch like a vise from her mouth into the curve of her hip, scattered frigid brands across the expanse of her stomach.

His rooms were vast and open and dark as caves, sparsely furnished in fine woods and furs, immaculately tidy save for a litter of books that ravaged the walls. An array of ornately crafted daggers lined the surface of a small dresser-table, and one in particular caught her eye: a long steel weapon bearing three sharp prongs, two which twisted like a bovid's horns and one mimicking the curve of a claw. In one corner Sif could near swear she had spotted something metal and gleaming; but in the moment she returned her attention to the place, it had vanished.

His bed was richly furred and decked in fine silk sheets, artfully threaded; they spared no time, crashing into it without ceremony, and if Sif had not been so thoroughly occupied with extraneous affairs, she might have paused to admire its luxury.

When they'd settled further he shifted his head to rest between her legs, and she shoved her wrist into her mouth to impede whatever noise threatened from her throat; her fingers raked through the mussed triangle of his hair, wefted through black strands themselves shrouded in darkness.

His tongue was braided silk, not a blemish marring its smooth surface, gliding against her as a whisper: agonizingly, deliberately slow. She snarled, yanked a hand from his head to tend to the ache, and he laughed, his nose grazing the swirls of soft spangled hair.

"Forever impatient," he murmured, and all-too-gently scraped with his teeth before she could find the words to retort.

They both knew the implications of the act, and both knew the truth of it: it was not a favor, not a gesture of mindfulness, but merely another premise that struck the prince as thrilling; it was no more selfless than the times he had returned a stolen child's toy simply to gauge his reaction, an experiment conducted in the darkness of Loki's mind.

His fingers on her hips gripped ironclad, a near pittance to her strength, yet tolerated all the same. Bruises were the products of war and triumph, of struggle, an artform which Sif regaled most highly and which, when sowed so beautifully into the woman's pale skin by his own fretful fingers, set Loki's nerves alight.

They each of them had their own reasons, their own counsels to keep.

He flicked his tongue upward once more, coupling the motion with two long fingers thrust hungrily home, and she unraveled with a wordless abandon.

When he surfaced to face her, his eyes were the color of his hair.

Her breathing slowed only with conscious focus as she extended a still-trembling hand to his arousal, angry and stiff, and palmed it in a steady, forgiving motion.

He hissed with displeasure at the slowness, the noise grating his throat, and it required Sif a conscious effort to refrain from laughing in the hale of a victory of which no soul apart from theirs would ever be aware.

"Would you truly be seen this way?" she mocked softly, all the while increasing her pace; and the soft growl that reached her ears was a delicious spoil. "Would you place so much trust in me that your slithery resolve would fall away, as a snake to his hole?"

He smiled sleek, forced her hand away to clench at her shoulders, and she strode him with the presence of a predator, swooping down to take his lip between her teeth.

"There is nothing I do that is without reason." He spoke the words into her mouth, and Sif could discern them forged of pewter rather than silver; they were rough words, unoiled, unfiltered, the true character of the dark prince exhaled into her skin.

It suited him, she thought, clasping her ankles into the drum of his spine.

He keened when their hips met, awkward and angular and as yet unsullied by muscle, even hers. "You are a most undisciplined lover," he whispered to the shell of her ear, the full quality of quicksilver mist returned to his voice lovely and lethal, "and a most dangerous game."

She grinned at him then, and without so much as a preemptive sigh lowered herself onto him, drunk on the flutter of his lashes as he closed his eyes, clamped his teeth into her neck to mask from her the fact that he had lost.

"You would be made queen of this realm," he murmured suddenly into her skin, unmoving, the bitterness of the words lost on neither party. "The great warrior Sif, made to rule in splendor alongside my headstrong brother. A royal pair to plunge Asgard into war. To glory."

"There is nothing you have said just now that did not weigh heavy with resentment upon your heart," she told him, sighing as he kneaded her breasts in his hands.

"You view him the rightful heir to the king's throne."

"I view him the chosen heir to it," she answered, and it was not a lie.

"I would steal you," he spoke ragged into her neck, admiring the needlelike pinpricks that rose there, "from my father's breadth like a magpie his tokens. I would obscure you from my brother's reach, immerse myself so far into your consciousness that nothing short from the grace of death could cast my image from your mind."

A fine quiver grasped her shoulders before settling into her wrists, and he shifted himself within her, capturing her resultant breath with his lips.

"I will corrupt you yet," Loki breathed, and meant every word.

"There is nothing to be corrupted in an empty heart."

He laughed at that, laughed because it was their game, because he knew there would never be a moment when Sif was not keeping score.

"_Clever_ girl," he whispered, and took her plait between his teeth as they began to thrust.

* * *

"Your supper," she remarks the next evening in a tone as cold as she knows his skin to be, pushing the chrome platter of meat and bread before waiting eyes before releasing his restraints with a now-automatic ease.

He looks at her expectantly.

"Do you require something other?" she asks him, her posture unreadable, even to a master of purveyance. Her hands remain stilted, brushing her sides, almost too still to appear natural.

He says nothing, reveals nothing, only continues to peer into the face of a warrior who, for all the worlds, seems to have borrowed the stone-laid features of a fire-haired woman with whom he had once spoken, behind the glass walls of a prison not unlike this one.

"The blood which stains our ledgers," he whispers, "is a delightfully permanent accent." And he laughs.

She freezes, her grip on the bonds like ice, before her hands fly to her knives. The muzzle and bracers fall to the floor with a devastating _clang_.

"Love is for children, indeed," he sputters, and it's the last thing he says before the guards burst into the open doors of the room.

* * *

Night falls, and far beyond the golden palace a young buck watches without expression as a single star blinks its last breath and dies, fading without a sound into the vast arms of the sky.


	10. Fall

When Sif enters the prison room the following morning, the temperature has fallen markedly from its normal threshold.

She makes quick work of the muzzle and cuffs, places before him his morning bread and cheese, his goblet of water. The room falls to silence as the breakfast is consumed, and Sif props herself against the perimeter of Loki's cell, surveys him with sleepless eyes.

His final words of the previous day are a mass upon her consciousness, as though Mjolnir itself has been dropped to her breast. She cannot clearly think for the memory of his tone, the curious words. A flare of enmity worms through her defenses and stains her features. Loki smiles, mirthlessly.

"You wish to say something," he quips with such easy casualty that she knows it to be farcical, knows of the resentment propagating in his chest.

Sif crosses her arms, betraying nothing. "Who is to speak when there is nothing to say? Only a fool."

"How clever you must think yourself," he tells her quietly. "How fine a warrior, to so hungrily collect your victories on a string like the bladders of livestock."

"You wish to provoke me," she says. "It is futile."

"I wish to dismantle that infuriating coat of armor with which you are so _wisely_ shielding yourself," he simpers, "and your tongue with it."

Loki's sneer pulls at the corners of his lips as if by an invisible thread, alarmingly unstable and twitching with something Sif can identify as neither anger nor glee. She beckons her body to remain still against the arc of the crystal, pores carefully over a next possible move.

"You would so hastily put out my tongue," she begins slowly, clenching her knuckles against the wall, "even when it has drawn so many sighs from your lips?"

It is a crooked play, and she knows it, and she forces down the sudden sensation of sickness which grips her stomach as the man balks.

Then he laughs.

He tosses his head back and howls, unrestrained and violent and shrill; his face churns with blood, his eyes crazed as he pounds his fists into the floor.

A pair of guards rush then into the chamber, one young and one elderly and richly bearded, both toting spears held stiff before panicked faces. They look to Sif for direction. She does not give it.

"Look at you. The Loki which I know would laugh at your behavior," Sif says then, a final vestige, and the thread snaps.

"And what do you know of me?" he retorts, pallid features contorting in rage. "You understand nothing of the burdens I carry, nothing of the child scrounging in his brother's footsteps, nothing of the man I was forced to become! You mock me with your presence, taunt me with your flesh; and for what purpose?" He grasps the stem of the metal goblet between long fingers before pitching it to the ground, his face blanched white. "What am I to you, a warrior of this realm? What am I, in light of the golden glory of my brother?"

She does not speak, does not move to touch her knives. When three more armed guards surge into the room like lightning, she does not turn to look at them, but senses their footfalls.

"Stop," she orders, and curses the unsteadiness of her voice.

"It is the folly of the shadow," he continues, his eyes wild, "which arises from the light's brilliance. Inevitable, and yet feared by every whimpering child who lies awake in his mother's bed at night!"

He's laughing now, easily, unsoundly. Sometime between the choked breaths, .

"You were never destined to become a shadow," Sif says, carefully, her fingers hovering above a tongue-shaped dagger. "It was avarice and jealousy that led you to this cell."

The laughter ceases abruptly. She watches Loki clutch a leg to his chest.

"You know nothing, always knew nothing," he breathes, and with a hand braced against the floor, moves to stand. Two of the guards adopt fighting stances, arms at the ready, while the third moves to leave, perhaps to alert the kingdom; he stops in his tracks at a single glance from Sif.

"Wait," she orders him. "Please."

"Was it truly inevitable?" he asks her, drawing closer to her arched form. "That the great golden son of Odin would rise to be ruler, despite every rash judgement, every defiance to the realm of Asgard, to his King? Is it due to his stature, or his smile, or his regal command of the skies?"

He steps closer, and she arches back, glancing to the sealed door of reinforced crystal behind her.

"Or is it simply because _this_-" he lurches forward, and suddenly there are five raven-haired gods of mischief within the enclosure and Sif is shouting at the guards to remain still without truly understanding the reasons behind such a foolish gesture, "is not considered an _admirable_ ability for a king to possess?"

The five Lokis circle around her, engulfing her, and then from the five there are ten, and from those ten more; and the sorcery continues until the space is teeming with Lokis that are not truly Lokis but specters of shadow and magic: a nightmare manifest in swirling tendrils of black and grey and green eyes that smolder like emerald coals.

"Lady Sif, _please!_" the shortest guard cries in alarm, "I think it would be wisest if-"

"And so you see," the Lokis chant, a simultaneous outburst of metal bitterness emanating from innumerable sets of bloodred lips, "that not ten, not fifty, not one hundred of me could hope to prove more worthy in this kingdom's eyes... than _he_."

The implications are dismally plain.

"So this is the fate you have chosen," Sif says with a ragged breath, and somehow in the calamity she's come face to face with three of the copies, her wavering fingers the sole outlier belying a heavy calm. "Either to rule the kingdom which incited your hand with a cruel fist, or to waste in chains within its walls."

Then, tersely, she drops the dagger and straightens herself, choosing the Loki with the darkest eyes and gazing directly into them.

"What do I know of you," she whispers, and her face is a tablet of stone. "You are called Loki, son of Odin, prince of Asgard. You are what some realms would refer to as a god. You originated as one of the Frost Giants, a secret unknown to most of the kingdom, and were taken in in confidence by the All-Father."

"What are you doing?" the closest Loki barks, but the words have no bearing.

"As a child, you were quiet and studious. You prize knowledge to an extent that is lost upon many of the warriors of this realm," she says, ethereally calm. "You were a friend and a challenge, a confidante to a girl struggling to prove her worth in a world dominated by men. You enjoyed playing petty tricks on your brother, whom you both loved and feared."

He's wavering now, the Loki that holds her gaze, and unbeknownst to the room at large, four of the copies vanish without so much as a hiss into the air.

She grabs at the tie restraining her hair, pulls, watches his face as it streams across her shoulders like dark rain.

"You are the reason my hair is dark," she says quietly. "When I was a young child and you not much older, you cast some form of spell that caused it to grow in this color. It had been yellow, before."

Seven copies gone. Ten. "You knew all of this?" the Loki asks, and she nods.

"You have committed acts unforgivable to this realm and to another," she continues. "You would have your own blood bow to you, your own brother in chains, groveling at your feet." Her hands are upon her knives once more, and deftly she swings a polished blade in a wide arc, causing the last remaining copies to stagger back, crumple, melt into the one original form who stumbles and falls to his knees before the warrior woman just as so many had fallen before him. As Sif herself had, once before.

"I could kill you," she breathes. "So often I have dreamed of killing you, and I cannot. You have asked me this day what you are." She closes their distance, lifts her hand to her mouth and rips off the gauntlet protecting it with her teeth. Reaches, and grasps his jaw with flaming fingertips.

"You are the shadow that haunts me in the night," she says, a breath on the wind, and when he closes his eyes, she knows it is a gesture of spite to them both. "I -" she stops then, abrupt, and turns her head only slightly leftward; and before she can register the handmotion, even allow it to be entertained, her dagger lies embedded in the hollow of stone directly between his legs.

She releases his jaw from her fingers.

When Sif turns to open the enclosure door, she finds herself staring out at the lances of no fewer than twenty armed guards, some of whom watch her with awestricken faces while others gaze in bewilderment at a visibly shocked Thor, who stands with his mother near the room's exit doors, a rather apologetic-looking squatty guard just behind them.

That night she is unvisited by dreams of any sort, because she does not sleep.

* * *

The look in Sif's eyes as she braced to stand, facing the helmed prince who stood so complacently before Odin's great throne, affected Loki more than any gaze he had yet lived to see.

His words of war and Jotunheim and continuity for the good of Asgard fell like violent hail about her ears. His smile, which began and ended with the sight of her friends pulling her back, incensed her.

It was inevitable, perhaps, that they should fall to violence.

She had known it and she had foreseen it and now fear had taken the form of reality in this most horribly splendid apparition, a promise of devastation as sure as winter's frost in the creases of his mouth.

"We're done."

The so-called Warriors Three stood all too quickly, and he feasted upon their fear, imbibed the sensation of power like an excellent wine; and he tamed a flicker of elation when he saw her remain steadfast in place, undaunted by his gaze.

Her lips drew into an impenetrable line, the corners of her mouth turned a hair's breadth upward in contempt, an expression very nearly passable as a sort of perverse sneer. She wanted a fight; they both did in their different ways. But Sif didn't trust herself to touch Loki, and the warriors didn't trust her not to. So she glared.

The ire twisting Sif's features delighted Loki_._ He did not hear the strike of her boots as she left, nor the rapid whispers of her friends. He did not hear anything all save for the tone of her voice in his head when she had addressed him as her king.


	11. Though We May Come

When Sif next sees the prisoner she bears no platter and no goblet, but instead a more intangible purpose.

"I have been to see the Lady Frigg," she tells him with a furtive glance, and looks away, cursing her weakness.

She had come before the All-Mother abject in the middle of the night, gently beckoned into the woman's rooms. It had taken Sif the finest measure of will to refrain from collapsing before the feet of her queen, from spilling her tears like a wretched child into the precious furs carpeting her bedchamber. The wife of Odin, in her compassion, had simply taken the warrior's hand into her own and allowed Sif to speak.

"And what wisdom would my mother bestow?" Loki asks dryly, resentment coating his tongue. "Has she at last yielded to the prospect of my wickedness, conceded to my permanent punishment? Has she at last called you to realize the fate written in the letters of your name*, to stand patiently and gracefully at the left arm of my brother as he sits upon our father's throne?"

"She has discussed matters with the All-Father and wishes you to take initiative in the reconstruction of the Bifröst," Sif answers slowly, "in due time."

He tenses at this, frozen in space, for some time before inclining his head. Sif knows in that moment just how this is to unfold: without words, without protest, but with the ever-impending threat that Loki will always pose.

"I would imagine myself to be choiceless in the matter," he says finally.

"You concede so easily."

His features are raw and abraded. He turns to her exhausted, a man who has known defeat, who has held the whole of the universe in the palms of his hands and lost it.

Then he asks her a question she does not expect. "When did you discover the truth?"

She follows the path of a nook in the stone, clicks a heel against it. "After you left, all of us mourned. Your brother especially. I kept his counsel." She pauses, then adds, "and I have known of what became of my hair for some time."

"Does it not repel you, Sif? Does it not boil your blood to know you have lain with a Frost Giant?"

And again, as in so many instances before, she can indulge him no response; because there is no creed and no credence for such an unstable heart.

"All the words you could never say," Loki murmurs, and lets his eyes drift shut. "I read them like a book."

They loiter there in silence for an indefinable period, laid bare to the wily coaxing of Time; and when Loki at last opens his eyes, Sif is staring unguarded into his face.

"It was 'I love you,'" she says quietly, but the words fumble and fall, spilling from her lips as rotten wine. "It was 'I love you' and 'I hate you' and 'you are infuriating' and 'I wish as much to fall into your arms as to slice them to ribbons'." She's pacing now, circling him in a narrow arc, Loki transfixed upon those strong and savage hands that would render him as useless in all too many ways. "Those were the words I could not say, could never say."

An errant shadow crosses her face, diffuses into her hair.

"It was 'I came undone when you went away,' she whispers, and Loki can _feel _the charter, the endless scoreboard kept so solemnly between shadowed minds, crumble to dust by virtue of her eyes.

"I know it," he tells her.

* * *

Time, to Asgardians, is measured in the rise of dawn pitted against the genesis of night: a sequence of events cast in the glowing hands of Fate, unchangeable, a foundation for calendars and systems plotted in stone to guide the people as they live.

Time, to children, is measured in insurmountable walls and bullys' fingers, in the giggles of young maidens and the hairs upon young men's chins, in playtimes and mealtimes, in sisters and in brothers.

Time, to the warrior, is measured in the beats of battle-drums and hard-shelled boots, in the tinny shriek of a hefted knife; it is measured in glory, in the color red, in once-breathing shells who lie nameless, defeated upon the ground to join the dust once more.

Time, to Sif, is measured in victories gleaned, great and small, against the monsters of the field and the demons of her mind. It is measured in swells of pride and draughts of shame, in smiles allotted as fighter and as friend, in an identity of being which lies ever-obscure someplace between warrior and woman.

She thinks of him because his magic melded with her will is a vehement force, and a destructive one; she goes to see him because Time is guileful in the number of instances where the corners of her vision blaze green with his influence; she tastes him because he is what the realms call evil, because he is every bit the foil of all that the kingdom expects of her, and Sif has always harbored an abhorrence for the expected.

"I would corrupt you," he whispers to her torchlit form another night, and it is Time who unearths the memory of these words, velvet against her ear in a cavernous room swathed in darkness. "I, who cut your hair, who sullied your body and created a kingdom all my own within the deepest corners of your mind."

She lowers her arms then, forfeits her protective stance; the dagger in her hand slips from her fingers and falls, clattering to the ground, and Loki watches as it spins, spins, before coming to rest against the stone—a long, slender, tri-pronged model inlaid with a single shard of onyx.

Time, to lovers, is measured in feathered words: in coy glances and wafting lights, tinkling laughter and furious glares, in eyes and tongues and lips that brand into skin the secrets shared beneath a blanket of night.

Time, to them, is as the shadow: it creeps upon the conscience, a subterfuge of the mind, lovely, chaotic, infallible.

"A pity it wasn't enough."

_And to him, she is nothing._

_And to him, she is everything._

* * *

_* 'Sif' _is an Old Norse word meaning 'wife' or 'bride'.


End file.
